


In Kolkata

by linguamortua



Series: The Life and Times of Dr Bruce Banner [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Bruce Banner Feels, Bruce Banner Has Issues, Bruce Banner-centric, F/M, Gen, Het, Kolkata
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-21
Updated: 2015-03-21
Packaged: 2018-03-18 23:37:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3588186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linguamortua/pseuds/linguamortua
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Kolkata the heat is stifling, the human suffering is unbearable and the loneliness crushing. And yet, Bruce Banner finds a strange kind of peace there... at least for a while.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Kolkata

**Author's Note:**

> In this particular work, temperatures are in degrees Celsius.
> 
> You can add me [on Tumblr](http://lingua-mortua.tumblr.com/).

In Kolkata, the heat is like nothing Bruce has experienced before. He arrives in an unusually cool March, but at midday the temperature is already rising into the high 20s. He swelters in his stiff, American shirts, sweating through them almost immediately. The air is still; there is no relief. The swirling dust kicked up in the busy streets sticks to his skin and he never feels truly clean. Insects drone around him, around his tiny apartment, around everything. He gives up swatting them because it only makes him feel warmer. It feels much more humid than it is but it gets worse. By May, when he is becoming accustomed to the heat and has acquired a better wardrobe for the climate, the heat spikes sharply. At night he lies panting in his bed, the cheap plastic thermometer in the wall reading over 30°C and the humidity stifling before the rainy season. Then the rains come and the city’s pollution strips all freshness from it so that when he runs outside in the hope of cooling off, he feels no cleaner than before. He burns almost every day despite hats and sunscreen, and heat rash prickles under his arms and in the creases of his knees. His glasses mist over.

At first, the stifling heat and the merciless sun keep him indoors. He spends the first days in a mediocre, businessman’s hotel before he finds, miraculously, a studio apartment above a small clothing shop. The landlady owns the building and lives next door over a shop selling cheap jewellery; she takes his US dollars after professionally assessing him from head to toe. Amit, her adult son, is commanded to take the American to the tailors and find him more suitable clothes. He moves in immediately with two small suitcases and learns the rules (few) and the way to work the various appliances and utilities (many). Water must be boiled for drinking and heated for washing and so the kettle plug must be held into the faulty socket at the correct angle. The city is prone to rolling electrical brownouts, so he buys candles and a good torch. He is not allowed to smoke, keep pets or bring street girls to the apartment. The landlady is at least twenty years older than him and calls him _yes dear_ a little too loudly. He suspects she is mostly deaf. She treats him with distant kindness and a touch of disapproval, like a prodigal son, but mostly she leaves him alone.

Bruce has been in Kolkata for nearly two weeks and, armed with his lighter, locally-made shirts he is both more comfortable and less remarkable. The loneliness of his tiny, musty apartment begins to chafe him, so he makes contact with an old doctor acquaintance working for a non-profit medical clinic and waits for paperwork to be completed. He leaves the apartment and starts really looking at his new city. The garish Bengali signage is at first incomprehensible but he buys a phrasebook and immerses himself in learning, as if he is a student again. The constant sing-song calls of the barbers and shoeshiners on the street recedes to a hum in the background and he simply learns to ignore them like everyone else. He treads the streets in concentric circles around his apartment, learning about his _para_ , his neighbourhood. Where to get the best street food. How to haggle in the markets. How to dodge the drivers, the carts and the bicycles that careen along the roads with scant regard for human life. The new experiences attack him so constantly, so relentlessly, that he falls into bed each night and sleeps like the dead. He welcomes the exhaustion.

The contrasts in Kolkata are staggering. Rich and poor, most noticeably, and even his in less-than-modest neighbourhood he is rocked by the immediacy of the social hierarchies here. He passes so many beggars, so many people crawling along with missing limbs, such disfigurement that he soon becomes immune. And then there are the private cars and the young women dripping jewellery lounging inside them, bored and pampered. The unexpectedness of finding that while his landlady lives in this shabby quarter of the city, she owns several properties and a car, which her son drives like a maniac. On the same street, he can walk past tiny houses that are little better than shacks and then a flashy new building with security guards. Or, further away from his apartment, a huge, colonial courthouse followed by a rapidly-growing glass skyscraper. He struggles to make sense of the city’s logic and eventually concludes that there is none. Kolkata overflows with a kind of relentless, chaotic human energy; how would distinctions of neighbourhood ever contain it? Some days, Bruce begins to feel that raw energy pounding inside his veins and he has to check himself, pull into an alleyway and breathe deeply, lest his transformation rip through him in the middle of the crowded street. It’s a fine balance between losing himself in the noise and bustle and losing himself altogether.

Finally, after a month, some magical alchemy of persistence, local knowledge, contacts and bribes pushes through his medical paperwork. On a Wednesday morning – Bruce checks the calendar and feels almost surprised that days of the week still exist – he dresses, packs a small bag with his medical kit and journal, and walks next door to beg a lift across the city from his landlady’s son.

‘Yes dear,’ she says, and then shakes her head as she reads the address. ‘No dear, this is not a good area. Not a good area.’ She waves her curious son away. ‘No dear, take train. Number nine, very quick.’ She closes the door in his face. Outside, Bruce consults his map and finds the train. He speeds towards a suburb in the north and asks around. An hour late and sweating profusely he finds the clinic, apologises and has his apologies waved away.

‘India,’ shrugs his friend, running a hand over a tired, unshaved face. ‘Come. I’ll show you around the clinic.’ There is not much to show; half a dozen small rooms in a run-down building, a few modern facilities but lots of piecemeal medical solutions. The waiting room is full and a queue runs down the whole block. When Bruce enquires, they tell him that the queue never goes away. Nobody pushes in line or makes a fuss. This is the only medical clinic for miles that will take them. Bruce remembers slick military medical facilities, health insurance, never going without and the guilt twinges for a second, until a man comes in pouring blood and, without thinking, he rushes to help.

The hectic pace of life does not slow, rather morphs. Bruce wakes up at 5am, eats cold rice or fruit or little leftover _rasgulla_ balls, heavy with syrup. He dresses, dashes to the train station and packs in among the other travellers, dashes to the clinic, washes his hands and begins. There is no coffee shop here, no private security, no lounge, kitchen or well-appointed laboratory. Just dirt and blood and crushing poverty, food snatched in moments or foregone, a tiny toilet cubicle with cockroaches and a bucket of greyish water to flush with. He works until it is dark and they close the clinic, staggers into his apartment clutching a box of curried fish or fragrant, spiced meat wrapped in _roti_. Sometimes he hasn’t eaten in sixteen hours and he tears into the food in the street, scooping up rice and sauce in chunks of _paratha_ and barely swallowing. Somehow, amongst all the dirt and sickness and contagion that he encounters, with all the street food he wolfs down with unwashed hands, he never gets sick. His mutation protects him. He scribbles down medical notes, washes his face and body over the sink and rolls naked into bed before midnight.

During the day he delivers babies, administers vaccinations, and lances infections. Most of the people who come in are suffering from the diseases of poverty: malnutrition, vitamin deficiencies, chronic coughs, skin infections, eye infections, parasites and worms. He pumps children full of IV fluids and vitamin tablets, learns Bengali and Hindi phrases for ‘you must boil the water’ and ‘no solid food’ and ‘take one every day for a week.’ He sees street girls with sexually transmitted diseases, boys with horrific injuries from fighting with rivals, women who have had a baby a year for ten years and lost most of them and are falling apart inside, battered wives, men shrieking and bloodied from industrial accidents, youngsters with chemical burns, late stage cancer, tuberculosis. He helps families wrap their loved ones in old blankets, in curtains, in papery sheets of a medical blue. He carries the tiny corpses of children home while their broken mothers wail and tear at their hair. Their thin bodies are insubstantial in his hands but he remembers being bigger, stronger, and ripping down walls to crush people and suddenly those tiny bodies pull at him with all the weight of his memories.  

By September, the rainy season on Kolkata is coming to an end and he no longer has to wear sandals outside and carry his dry shoes in his bag. The weather cools by ten degrees and he finds more energy, less relentless focus on the work. He starts leaving an hour earlier, because he can, starts noticing other humans again. He sits in a park on his day off and watches the world go by. He makes small talk in a mixture of awkward Bengali and English with the pleasant elderly couple who run the shop underneath his apartment. Once, he goes to a bar with his landlady’s son and idly watches the lad chat up girls while he nurses a single beer all evening. Does he want to call someone back home? He isn’t sure. He likes the escape here, but the loneliness is creeping back in. Bruce thumbs at his cheap, local phone and considers. There isn’t anyone who’d want to talk to him, anyway. He flips to the back page of his journal and starts writing as if to a trusted friend, tells them about his day, and his self-imposed exile, and the food and the heat and the suffering and how he is desperate to lose himself somehow.

Confusingly, his libido begins to make its presence felt for the first time in years. Bruce has never been primarily driven by his sexual desires and after Betty he had almost lost interest entirely. In fact, one of his strongest motivations for keeping busy was to tamp down any budding relationships, to avoid the troublesome loss of control that came with love or sex. It’s different now, now that he’s so unmoored from his old life and this new and racing city is becoming his home. Now that he’s seen the way that the most unfortunate cling to life. He starts to notice women and grapples with the strange ethics of being a white man in India. Every day he comes face-to-face with the skinny, big-eyed, too-young street girls that he treats at the clinic, living hand to mouth by selling their bodies for a pittance. The older, cannier, less desperate women who lounge sultry in their garish saris and call to him _hey, hey English, come talk to me_. Slimy little men with limited English who sidle up and promise _something special, young, very nice_. Occasionally something about his appearance will make a bosomy married lady smile at him in the street with matronly confidence, or set two young women giggling and whispering at once another in a shop, pulling their billowing _dupatta_ scarves close so he can’t glimpse their girlish glee. He might give a cautious smile back, but he remembers one of the younger doctors at the clinic, a serious-faced Indian woman with an American medical degree, warning off a colleague. _They’re not like American girls_ , she had lectured the blushing man, _You could get a nice Indian girl in serious trouble with her family_.

Bruce keeps an ear open at the clinic. The staff is mostly comprised of young doctors looking for a good year or two of charitable experience on their slender resumes, or established doctors taking a sabbatical. The odd researchers working on sexual health in developing countries, or women’s health, or paedatrics care in poor communities. Mostly white, some Indian. Nobody stays here long but the Westerners crack first, seeking out bars and other expats to drink themselves into oblivion and flying home with stress-related illnesses. He mentally notes down the names of this street or that bar, follows up idly and ducks out if he sees someone he knows. He doesn’t want to be friends.

Once he knows where the backpackers and gap years stay, where the expats go to drink, he heads out once in a while. Bruce barely drinks, disliking the ebbing sense of control and the disorientation (too similar to the accident and the changing and the medical experiments). He’ll nurse the same Kingfisher or Kalyani for a couple of hours. Surprisingly, pleasingly, for the first time in his life, he finds that women come to him. He lets them talk and stand close to him and rest artful hands on his arm or chest. Sips his beer, gives vague answers of _just doing some work out here for a few months_ or _no, I’m a scientist_ and _not married, no girlfriend_. The older expat women idly thumb their wedding rings and tell him they know a good hotel. They are made bold by the alcohol, bored by their workaholic husbands and constricted lives of private cars and gated communities and avoiding the locals. Bruce finds them unnerving; he has no desire to end up on the wrong side of a husband, no wish to involve himself in someone else’s infidelity. Besides, he is not so obscure that a word in the right place couldn’t easily find his identity. He is under no illusions; his Indian-made shirts and unbranded shoes are not what these women are looking for. They are bored, spoiled and indolent, and secretly like the idea of fucking a stranger in a cheap suit to needle their paunchy, middle-aged husbands.

The younger women are much less savvy and don’t press him for surnames or hometowns or ask him who he knows. They chatter away, laugh easily, tell him how _totally inspiring_ the city is, outline their plans for a big road trip to this sacred site or that beach town. They smile up at him – or sometimes down at him, honestly, because he isn’t that tall – and hesitantly ask where he’s staying. Does he, you know, want to hang out elsewhere? Their tactlessness is endearing rather than brash. He ducks out of bars with them and they flag down a random car or dash hand-in-hand to catch the night bus. He whispers that he’s not supposed to have female guests as they creep up the back stairs and they muffle their giggles with a hand.

In his bedroom, they are both naïve and strangely performative, simultaneously eager and restrained. He imagines inept college boyfriends and their neuroses and fragile masculinity. Quietly, so as not to alert the landlady to their presence, the young women ask him _you like what you see_ or _want to help me take this off_ and he murmurs his assent into their necks and pulls them down onto the bed. The first couple of times, Bruce would peel off his clothes and reach out to pull the girl in and expect her to smell like light orchid perfume and shampoo and feel like Betty in his arms. He soon learns to ignore the past. He has never, that he knows of, been counted a _bad_ lover, but he starts to learn how to be truly good in bed. He perfects the trick of teasing a soft inner thigh with tongue and hot breath; he becomes aware of all the tells that demand he be rougher or gentler; his desires start to spill out his mouth and he whispers filthy endearments met with gasps and whimpers.

Three months pass and Christmas slides by without him really noticing. He has been in Kolkata for over nine months now, and in between the work and the women, the trauma of his old life is beginning to slough away. The tense combination of anger-lust-work is still there, but it recedes into a dull hum in the back of his head. One night, he lies in bed with a sleepy brunette in her late 20s drowsing on his chest. She is telling him in a sleepy voice about how she wants to spend some time on a yoga retreat. He lies awake for a long time after she falls asleep, thinking about the discipline of breathing himself calm, of clinging to control just enough during sex that he doesn’t change into the other guy. A wizened old man assesses him and agrees to teach him, so a couple of times a week he sits cross-legged with the teacher and learns the art of _pranayama_. The man refuses payment. Bruce is not sure that any payment could cover the enormity of the gift. Before, he had learned a rudimentary kind of control. Now, he is on a deeper path and there are moments, when he sits in his room immersed in practice, that he feels a kind of calm acceptance.

He stops trawling bars. He runs into a young woman that he’d slept with months back, on her way back from a long trip around East India.

‘You look better,’ she tells him, brown eyes creasing in her newly-tanned face as they lean against the bar.

‘I wasn’t ill,’ he says, and she finishes her beer with a long swallow, laughs at him gently.

‘You were grim as hell,’ she explains. ‘Kind of sexy in this intense, troubled, older-guy kind of way.’ She too has changed; she is more expansive, more confident. She tells him she’s leaving India soon to take up a Ph.D in Canada. They go to her hotel and have half-drunk, riotous sex, up against the wall with her fist grabbing his hair and his face buried in her freckled neck. She ribs him about his grey hairs, tucks her email address into his shirt pocket and kisses him soundly. They part, all-smiles and he feels ebullient as he walks home. Dinner tastes great. It’s a beautiful evening. He _is_ better. While walking through a pleasant suburban street, he considers the well-kept houses with tidy squares of garden and thinks _I could live here_.

Scant weeks later a little girl tugs on his sleeve in the clinic, _please sir please mister_. He follows her through the cramped, ramshackle homes, stepping over filth in the street and ducking into a poorly-lit house. There is no sick mother. The girl flees, and out of the shadows steps a heart-stoppingly beautiful white woman with long red hair framing an oval face. She speaks her name, _Natasha Romanov_ , needles him until he yells _stop lying to me_ and hates himself for the lapse. All these months of freedom and he was never out of their sight. He wonders if they know about the women. He wonders if they care about the hundreds of sick and injured. He wonders if they even notice the broken and starving brown bodies as they spy and watch and creep. He fleetingly thinks about how much he’s going to miss the little _roti_ vendor on his street. In the end, they politely but firmly escort him from slum to private car to private jet. His belongings are waiting for him on the plane and his last thought as they rise above the clouds and the pollution is that he didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to his landlady.

He knows that after this betrayal he’ll never return to Kolkata.


End file.
